Latest / UK Column Radio / UK Column ‘On Location’ in Cheltenham: Katharine Gun

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UK Column ‘On Location’ in Cheltenham: Katharine Gun · UK Column Radio

0:14
Thank you, thank you, thank you very much.
0:17
It's very daunting to be back in Cheltenham.
0:21
I did live here for 10 years and then I moved away and coming
0:26
back and being right next door, not that I ever worked at the
0:32
doughnut, but on the day that I came back yesterday, I arrived
0:38
back and I thought, oh, I forgot my hair brush, damn it because I
0:43
came in from Turkey and and I thought I need to you can't hear
0:49
me. Oh sorry.
0:50
I said I came yesterday from Turkey and I forgot my hair
0:55
brush and I thought, oh, I'm going to have to go out and find
0:57
1. And so as I went out, I suddenly
1:02
realised it was 4:00 and that's when everybody from GCHQ is
1:06
leaving work. And I was like, Oh my God,
1:08
they're what are they? Oops, never mind.
1:14
And so anyways, it's very odd being back next to the doughnut
1:21
and 22 years to this day, I had been arrested on suspicion.
1:32
So 22 years ago, I was sitting in my house with all of my
1:37
friendship circle severed and being in a state of limbo,
1:43
thinking, Oh my God, what's going to happen to me from now
1:47
on? I don't know how I'm going to
1:48
continue. I don't know what I'm going to
1:50
do. And that moment, well, the whole
1:55
experience up until that point is one of my red pills.
2:01
As we've been talking about what what was your big red pill?
2:03
That was one of my major red pills.
2:08
And even though I grew up in a slightly different background to
2:12
most UK citizens, I was still very mainstream until that
2:18
moment. So it's strange how you know,
2:22
people across the world are more or less in the same boat boat,
2:28
being raised at school to respect authority and being
2:34
beaten down into that submission of respecting authority when I
2:39
was at school. I will explain a little bit
2:42
about my background. So I was born in 1974 in Durham.
2:49
And when I was born, my dad, who'd started teaching French at
2:55
grammar school, had thought to himself, Oh my God, I don't want
2:58
to do this for the rest of my life.
3:00
I want to pursue what I've always wanted to pursue, which
3:04
when he was at school, his headmaster had said, why on
3:07
earth do you want to do that? Learn Chinese.
3:10
So when I was born and my mum came into a bit of inheritance,
3:15
he said, look Jan, would it be possible if I could do a degree
3:20
in Chinese? And she said, all right, love,
3:23
we can live off my inheritance for the next three years.
3:27
So that's what happened. And my dad did a Chinese degree
3:32
at Durham. And then after he did the
3:35
three-year degree because in the 70s.
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So yeah, in the 70s they didn't go abroad to China because you
3:44
know, of China's turbulence. So he thought, oh, I'd really
3:48
like to apply my learned experience now to a reality.
3:55
So he said to my mum, what do you think about going to live
3:58
abroad in a Chinese speaking country?
4:01
And so they decided, he decided on Taiwan and being the safest
4:05
bet and the most Chinesey of Chinese cultures.
4:10
And he got a job at a private university where he ended up
4:14
teaching and my mum did as well. So we moved to Taiwan in 1977.
4:21
I attended a local nursery school from the age of three and
4:25
being by that point I had become a really chatty little 3 year
4:33
old in English. But being thrust into a Chinese
4:37
speaking nurseries school I suddenly become became numb
4:41
completely and I didn't know how to express myself or understand
4:45
what was going around me. So apparently I didn't speak a
4:49
word for six months. And then the nursery school
4:54
teachers told my parents, oh, she started speaking sentences
4:58
in Chinese. So young children sit and
5:03
observe everything around them. That's what they do.
5:06
And we don't know what's going on in their heads, but they're
5:10
absorbing so much information. And I learned a language in six
5:14
months. So from then on, I moved on to
5:21
an American missionary school when I was 11 because my parents
5:25
knew that I was failing to keep up with my Taiwanese classmates
5:34
and they also hoped that I would go to university in the UK.
5:37
So I needed a English language education and the only one was
5:41
this American missionary school. So I, I ended up going there,
5:46
which was complete culture shock to the Taiwanese school I'd
5:51
attended. And, and I was there for five
5:55
years and the first Gulf War happened while I was at the
6:00
American school. And for the first time in
6:04
probably it's whole history, we had armed guards on the gate.
6:08
And so it struck me that something really serious and
6:12
political was going on. And of course, also actually in
6:17
the Taiwanese school system, I learnt about the Opium Wars, and
6:22
it was a, you know, I was the only person in my school that
6:26
was foreign, basically. And so they looked at me and
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they sort of jokingly said, oh, it was your family that did it.
6:34
And, you know, I felt really shocked, like we didn't do
6:38
anything. But it made me realize that
6:42
actually, you know, the British history, the British Empire did
6:47
have a lot of answers or a lot of questions that needed to
6:52
answer. But at that age, I didn't know
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what they were. I went on after, after my five
6:59
years at missionary school, my parents thought, well, we need
7:02
you to go to English university and you're not, you're going to
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need to be slotted into the English system.
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So they decided that I should go to boarding school.
7:13
So when I was 17, they packed me off to boarding school and I was
7:19
there to do my A levels. Sadly that school went bankrupt
7:25
during COVID and it's no longer there.
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And then after my A levels, I went on to do a degree in Durham
7:37
University. And funnily enough, I chose the
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same subject as my dad, which was Chinese, but I added
7:44
Japanese because doing Chinese was a bit of a cop out.
7:50
And then I also stayed at the my mother's college, which was
7:56
Saint Mary's College, which at the time was an all girls
7:59
college. No longer, it's become a mixed
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college as well, so there are no longer single sex colleges in
8:07
Durham anymore. From then on, I went to teach at
8:13
the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program and I was sent to, I had
8:17
no choice. I was sent to Hiroshima, but I
8:21
was not in the city. I was out in the mountains,
8:24
beautiful countryside in Japan, and it was a very small
8:30
community, about 3000 people spread across valleys and so on.
8:37
And sadly, that's another thing that's disappeared because when
8:40
I've looked on Google Maps to try and find this community, it
8:45
doesn't exist anymore. And in fact, when I was there,
8:48
they told us how, told me back in sort of 30-40, fifty years
8:55
earlier, their popular population was around 30,000.
9:01
So you can see how the migration to city centres started in Japan
9:08
way before that. And now literally there's nobody
9:11
living in the countryside anymore.
9:15
So I then came back to the UK to do some temporary work and I was
9:22
looking for a job and I saw an advert for GCHQ where they were
9:29
asking for Mandarin linguists and I thought, Oh well that
9:32
sounds interesting. It's not businessy that is so
9:35
it's not a dog eat dog world of the business world.
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I'll, I'll go to GCHQ because it's looking after the national
9:42
security, ha ha. So I didn't, I didn't realise
9:49
what I was getting into because as I say, I was very naive and I
9:53
hadn't been red pilled. Is it red pilled?
9:57
But I can never remember which one it was.
9:59
Anyways, this is a photo of when I was at school in Taiwan.
10:03
I don't know if you can spot the Blondie.
10:14
A sea of little blackheads and my blonde hair.
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And this is another photo of me. And you see, I was standing to
10:23
attention. I was very dutiful.
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We were dressed up for a skit. I can't remember what it was,
10:29
but anyways, look at everyone else slouching.
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But I was very standing there. Anyway, so I joined GCHQ in
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January of 2001 and I joined with about 11 other linguists
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and we formed an A nice group of recent graduates from university
10:53
and we got on really well and enjoyed our time together.
10:58
We had a two weeks induction course where they basically told
11:02
us don't trust journalists, whatever you do, never trust a
11:08
journalist. And that lived with me for a
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very long time and it's still somewhat part of my DNA.
11:15
Now, I didn't know this. I only recently discovered this.
11:22
In fact, I discovered this when I was researching.
11:25
In order to do this speech. The European Parliament started
11:33
investigating Echelon in July 2000 and they set up a temporary
11:41
committee and they started interviewing and investigating
11:45
what Echelon was about and how did it work.
11:51
They produced a plenary session report which came out on the 6th
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of September 2001 and in their report which you'll be able to
12:03
find a lot of information about this on the journalist Duncan
12:07
Campbell's website. So Duncan Campbell, he was in
12:13
fact the first journalist who revealed the existence of GCHQ.
12:18
So I think that was in 1976. So if you go to his website,
12:24
you'll find a lot of information about this.
12:27
But the plenary report from the European Parliament Temporary
12:32
Committee was that NSA was conducting espionage and
12:40
basically stealing European businesses away or European or
12:45
customers away from European businesses.
12:48
And you know, the, the, the problem was that the UK was
12:53
involved in this Echelon, so the Europeans were getting very
12:59
antsy about America and UK and their dominance in this
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information space. And then 9/11 happened.
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So all of that suddenly got swept under the carpet and
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brushed aside Echelon disappeared.
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And it's really not been wasn't discussed until Snowden's
13:22
revelations in 2013. So on September 11th, I was at
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work. And you know, I have to say, it
13:31
was a shocking moment for all of us, but we didn't have any idea
13:36
how things were going to pan out.
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And then unbeknownst to us, Blair and Bush had a cosy
13:48
meeting in April in Crawley, Texas, Bush's native home.
13:54
And I think UK Column recently did an interview with somebody
13:58
who talked about Crawley, Texas and the is that right?
14:05
So I think if you go on UK Column on the website, you'll
14:08
see an interview with somebody who was involved in that and,
14:13
and saw what was going on, how it was a discussion about how
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they would take over Iraqi oil and so on.
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So on June the June 2000, so we're moving sort of in
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timeline. In June, I was a member of a
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committee that basically organised the first GCHQ ball
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that they'd ever had in 30 years.
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So I'll show you a picture of that in a minute.
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And then in July I got married and we're still married, which
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is rather amazing after all the things we've gone through.
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But we'd actually only known each other for seven months.
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So it was sort of a shotgun mem wedding.
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But it wasn't because I was pregnant or anything like that.
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It was because actually because the UK government told him his
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asylum claim had been dismissed or disallowed and that they were
15:13
going to remove him from the country.
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So we got married and then on the 23rd of July, which was my
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birthday as well. Again, this is something that we
15:24
only later discovered, but the Downing St. memo were that that
15:28
event took place where British diplomats and US diplomats and
15:34
British intelligence chiefs and American intelligence chiefs
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discussed how they were going to fix intelligence and facts
15:43
around the policy. But you know, we didn't.
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We didn't hear about this until later on.
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Oops, wrong thing. Right.
15:52
So that's a photo of the ball. For security reasons, I've
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blanked out their faces. Anyway, I don't know if they had
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any more balls after that. Alex No, I don't know.
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It was just the first thing I could click on anyway.
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And then subsequent to that ball, obviously, and then I got
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married and then we went to San Diego.
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So there was a conference in San Diego and we on the day off, we
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had this intelligence meeting on the day off we went to, we were
16:39
given this tour of this aircraft carrier.
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So, you know, it was quite exciting, but also a bit sort of
16:48
shocking to see this massive, you know, monstrous thing.
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And we went on board and there's me and my line manager again.
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Her face is blotted out now. I don't know what goes on now,
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but I had four line managers in the space of two years.
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Anyway, that's us on board the aircraft carrier.
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And as far as I can remember, the, the guys on the, on the
17:22
ship, the Mariners, they said when we asked them what was
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going on, they said, well, you know, miss, this ship was meant
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to be decommissioned, but we're having to get it ready so that
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we can deploy to the Gulf, Mum. And we said, why are you doing
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that? And they said, 'cause we want to
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whip some Iraqi apps. So that got me thinking, because
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this was September and really in the media we hadn't heard any
17:51
sort of talk of war yet. It was just about Iraq and how
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they had to be, you know, have weapons inspections in and so on
17:58
and so forth. There was no talk about war.
18:01
So that got my ears pricked up and as soon as I came back to
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the UKI decided to buy a couple of books.
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So these are the books that I bought Target Iraq and War Plan
18:11
in Iraq. I read read them cover to cover.
18:15
And after I did my research, I thought, well, there's
18:18
absolutely no justification and no reason for an invasion of
18:22
Iraq. And it was in this kind of
18:30
general attention of mine where, you know, I was paying attention
18:35
to all of the news broadcasts. I was watching the war
18:39
propaganda, the war mongering increase day by day.
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And I was becoming more and more concerned about where this was
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going. And then on the 31st of January,
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I go into work and I turn on my computer, go through my emails.
18:54
And there's one from NSA, which wasn't all that frequent.
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So I clicked on that one and read it, and I'll show you the
19:02
e-mail here. I'll have to skip through the
19:04
things. You probably can't see that it's
19:07
very small. So I'll read it to you.
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It says, as you've likely heard by now, the agency is mounting A
19:14
surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council members,
19:19
minus US and GBR, of course, for insights as to how membership is
19:24
reacting to the ongoing debate. Ari Iraq plans to vote on any
19:29
related resolutions, what related policies, negotiation
19:33
positions they may be considering, alliances,
19:36
dependencies, etcetera, the whole gamut of information that
19:41
could give U.S. policy makers an edge in obtaining results
19:45
favourable to US goals or to head off surprises in RT.
19:52
That means AQRC surge effort to revive create efforts against UN
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Security members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and
20:03
Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan.
20:06
UN matters. We'd also ask all RT toppies to
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emphasize and make sure they pay attention to existing non UN
20:16
Security Council member, UN related and domestic
20:20
communications for anything useful related to the UN
20:23
Security Council deliberations, debates, votes.
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We have a lot of special UN related diplomatic courage
20:31
coverage, various UN delegations from countries not sitting on
20:37
the UN Security Council right now that could contribute
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related perspectives, insights, whatever.
20:43
We recognize that we can't afford to ignore this possible
20:47
source. We'd appreciate your support in
20:50
getting the word to your analysts who might have similar,
20:54
more indirect access to valuable information from accessors in
20:59
your product lines. I suspect that you'll be hearing
21:03
more along these lines in formal channels, especially as this
21:07
effort will probably peak, at least for this specific focus,
21:11
in the middle of next week following the Secretary of
21:14
State's presentation to the UN Security Council.
21:19
Thanks for your help. So that's an image of NSA.
21:24
It's a massive black box. And when I read this e-mail, I
21:31
immediately thought how bloody dare they.
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It was really, it was a really shocking e-mail to me.
21:40
And I think that was the first moment that I thought, my God,
21:46
they want war and they're going to get it by, you know, these
21:51
illegal means. And if they get UN justification
21:55
for it, you know, that legalises the whole, what is essentially
22:01
an illegal war. It was just the, the phrasing of
22:05
it, the wording of it, the whole fact that they assumed we would
22:08
go along with it, that in fact we do go along with these things
22:11
all the time. It's a Siamese kind of
22:15
relationship they have. And so whatever the US policy
22:19
is, the US policy and the deep state sense of the word.
22:25
So that very moment I realised I I wanted to do something with
22:31
that piece of information, but I didn't do anything with it.
22:37
On that Friday, I went back home and I thought about it over the
22:43
weekend, but I didn't feel like I had anybody to discuss it
22:47
with. I certainly didn't talk to my
22:49
husband about it. I didn't call my parents, who
22:52
lived in Taiwan still at the time.
22:55
In the end, I called somebody, a contact and I said, look, I've,
23:02
I've received information at work that I think is explosive
23:07
and I really think it should get out to the public.
23:11
Can you do something about it? And she said, all right, send it
23:16
to me. So I posted it.
23:18
So well, before I did that, I on Monday, I went back into work
23:23
and, you know, I'd made-up my mind I was going to do this
23:26
thing. And so as it happened on
23:29
Mondays, I was in a different area of GCHQI, was on a
23:32
different terminal, not my regular terminal.
23:35
So I logged in there and I opened the e-mail and I copied
23:39
and pasted it and printed it off and put it into my handbag,
23:43
doing all of it surreptitiously, hoping that nobody was watching
23:47
me and absolutely petrified that somebody would like notice and
23:52
immediately flag me up to security.
23:55
But I managed to hold out for the rest of the day.
23:58
I managed to walk out of GCHQ with that top secret document in
24:01
my handbag and and that evening I posted it to my friend on
24:07
contact and I said before we'd finished our conversation at the
24:13
weekend, we agreed. Or she told me, don't ever call
24:18
me again. Don't ever refer to this again,
24:22
ever, on any letter, telephone, computer, whatever.
24:30
And I agreed. So I'm going back a bit.
24:36
Where are we now? Sorry, going back, going
24:40
forward. So that was the memo.
24:45
And then once the memo was out of my hands, I had a weird sense
24:50
of relief because I thought, well, it's gone now.
24:53
I yeah, I have no idea what's going to happen to it.
24:55
And I didn't know what was going to happen to it.
24:58
On 15th of February I went to the Million Man March in London.
25:04
I don't know if I was the only person from GCHQ, but I
25:08
certainly didn't know anybody else from GCHQ who went.
25:11
And it was such a historic moment, I think, for everybody
25:18
who attended that day, as other people have already described,
25:25
it was such a phenomenal atmosphere.
25:28
And I almost felt then that actually, you know, the public's
25:33
voice is so loud, so determined that Tony Blair absolutely
25:38
should do something about it. But of course, we know they'd
25:42
already made-up their mind. So I was very sort of, I was
25:48
beginning to feel quite relaxed and I thought, well, probably
25:53
nothing's going to happen to this now.
25:55
And I, I thought maybe I'd, you know, made done the wrong thing
25:59
or, or, or maybe I'd over imagined its importance.
26:03
But on the 2nd of March 2003, the Observer published it.
26:08
So this is the front page. This is what I saw when I went
26:13
to pick up the Observer newspaper on Sunday morning.
26:16
And as soon as I saw that headline, I thought, oh crap.
26:22
And actually it was a much worse word than that.
26:26
But anyways, I was absolutely petrified.
26:29
So petrified in fact, that I thought that that the man
26:33
serving me at the counter immediately realised that that
26:36
I'd I had leaked that piece of information.
26:42
So I went home and I cried to my husband and tried to explain to
26:47
him what was going on. And he said, you know, whatever
26:50
you do, keep your mouth shut. Well, unbeknownst to me, when
26:58
this hit the headlines in on the Sunday newspaper, Martin Bright,
27:03
who was the journalist who broke the story, received multiple
27:07
interviews from USTV stations. And so he was really chuffed.
27:12
He thought, wow, you know, I've I've made the big time now.
27:15
But then swiftly after they made the appointments, they called
27:19
him back and said, sorry, we're not covering this story.
27:24
And, you know, he tried to fathom out why, but they
27:26
wouldn't explain. Meanwhile, the Chilean and
27:30
Mexican ambassadors to the UN were furious.
27:33
And they were kicking up a fuss and saying, how dare you explain
27:36
what's going on. But other people were actually
27:39
quite pleased apparently that the US deigned to even pay them
27:44
any attention. Unfortunately, the story really
27:49
didn't get much coverage beyond what the Observer printed on
27:52
this on the Sunday. And beyond that it it just sort
27:57
of fizzled out. And this is one of the things
27:59
that really angered me about it was that none of the British
28:03
politicians that were anti war picked us up and ran with it.
28:07
So on the 5th of March, after the e-mail came got published,
28:16
after denying that I'd had anything to do with it, on the
28:20
5th of March, I decided to go in and confess because I felt so I
28:25
felt like I couldn't possibly lead a double life.
28:28
I couldn't carry on working at GCHQ knowing that I'd leaked
28:32
this information, knowing that they would be permanently
28:35
hunting for this leak and, you know, constantly being on my
28:39
guard, lying that I had been the one who did it.
28:43
So I did confess and I explained why I did it.
28:47
And they took me to Cheltenham police station where I was kept
28:52
overnight and it was not particularly pleasant.
28:59
And then the following day I was interviewed by Special Branch
29:03
and they they let me go within the 24 hour timeline.
29:08
Just in time on the same day, the 5th of March, Colin Powell
29:16
was sitting in the UN and waving his yellow cake uranium from
29:25
Niger, which never existed, but that convinced many to go along
29:33
with it. So the war begins.
29:37
And on the 17th of March, Robin Cook, the former Foreign
29:42
secretary and leader of the House of Commons, resigned to
29:45
the first ever standing ovation in the House of Commons.
29:51
And he says one of the few things he said in his speech,
29:56
Our difficulty in getting support this time is that
29:59
neither the international community nor the British public
30:03
is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for
30:07
this military action in Iraq. The threshold for war should be
30:12
high. He also said, I have heard it
30:16
said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to
30:22
complete disarmament and that our patience is exhausted.
30:27
Yet it is more than 30 years since Resolution 242 called for
30:32
Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
30:38
And the rest of the thing. Oops.
30:43
The rest of the thing says. And we haven't.
30:47
Our patience hasn't been exhausted with Israel.
30:51
Now I'm wondering if that paragraph had anything to do
30:56
with his unhappy accident on the mountain on the same day
31:03
Elizabeth Wilmshurst resigned from the FCO.
31:07
But she did it quietly and didn't make a big splash.
31:12
And on the same day, the Attorney General, Lord
31:15
Goldsmith, advised that the invasion of Iraq was legal and
31:19
nobody knew at the time that his previous legal advice had been
31:24
exactly the opposite. So on the 20th of March,
31:30
although they had already started bombing Iraq by then,
31:33
they officially launched the shock and awe invasion of Iraq.
31:39
Meanwhile, I was in a legal limbo for eight months and I
31:44
really didn't know what was going to happen to me.
31:47
It was just, you know, a wait and see cat and mouse game.
31:52
I was charged on the 13th of November.
31:56
And when I was charged, I discussed with my legal team,
32:00
you know, we, we were discussing the possibility that I would be
32:04
charged. And I said I don't feel guilty.
32:08
I feel like I did the right thing and I don't want to plead
32:11
guilty even if it means mitigating circumstances and a
32:15
reduced sentence in prison. And they said, well, we're going
32:19
to have to think of a good defence.
32:22
So they came up with the defense of necessity, which was untested
32:27
in the court and it was something they were quite keen
32:31
on trying to prove. But meanwhile, in sometime in
32:35
January, my husband's immigration status had got to
32:38
the point where they processed our marriage.
32:41
They decided that that wasn't an impediment to his removal.
32:44
So they went ahead and tried to deport him from this country.
32:49
So if you, any of you have seen the film, it's more or less as
32:54
it happened in the film. Basically I took my husband in
32:59
because as a failed asylum seeker, he had to sign in every
33:02
week to say that he was still in Cheltenham.
33:04
And on the day that he went to sign in, they just grabbed him
33:08
and put him down in the cells. So, you know, he, before I knew
33:12
it, they'd taken him in a van to Heathrow airport.
33:17
Luckily the only reason they weren't able to deport him was
33:21
because my then MP Nigel Jones contacted the home home
33:29
Minister, which was Margaret Beckett I think at the time.
33:33
And he said this looks like state sanctioned bullying, don't
33:35
you think? And she had to agree because
33:39
basically, I could have argued that having been under a
33:43
prosecution and had my passport taken away, that I wouldn't have
33:47
been able to join him in Turkey, where they were going to deport
33:50
him to. And so therefore, it was a, you
33:55
know, an abuse of my rights to a family life.
33:59
So that was the silver lining in the cloud because otherwise he
34:02
would have been deported to Ankara.
34:06
So on the 25th of February, the charges were dropped against me
34:10
because well, as Alex alluded to, their they argued, they said
34:16
in the actual Old Bailey, they said that they no longer had a
34:20
reasonable case for prosecuting me or reasonable chance.
34:27
And I think other people had described a not trying to, you
34:32
know, blow my own horn, but they said, you know, you they
34:35
couldn't actually imagine a more perfect whistle blower.
34:42
So the fact is I didn't take any money for my leak.
34:46
I did it for completely altruistic reasons and
34:50
furthermore most of the British public were anti war or a large
34:55
percentage of the British public and so getting a jury to convict
35:01
would have been extremely difficult.
35:04
Plus the general election was coming up and Tony Blair got in
35:10
again in 2005 to my absolute astonishment.
35:14
So I know I'm running quite close, in fact past the clock.
35:19
But I just want to go through quickly the destruction of Iraq.
35:23
So most of you are of the age and you know what happened in
35:27
the first Gulf War, the Operation Desert Shield, Desert
35:30
Storm, which was five weeks of intensive bombing of all Iraq
35:34
city and infrastructure. There's airports, factories,
35:38
water, sanitation centres, schools, hospitals, mosques,
35:42
everything they could find they bombed.
35:46
And, and that was as a revenge for Saddam invading Kuwait,
35:53
which you know, the, the, the American public, the British
35:56
public had to be propagandised with a fake atrocity, propaganda
36:04
about Kuwaiti babies in, in incubators.
36:09
They had to fake that that narrative in order to get the
36:15
public on board for this invasion of Iraq.
36:19
Otherwise people would have said leave them to it.
36:22
If Iraq wanted to invade Kuwait, you know what's that got to do
36:25
with us? So a very good book on the
36:30
actual war crimes that were committed in the Iraq first Gulf
36:35
War are by a journalist called Ramsey Clark.
36:38
The book's called the fire this time US war crimes in the Gulf.
36:43
Now when you Google Operation Desert Shield or Desert Storm or
36:47
use any of your other preferred. I did try DuckDuckGo, Brave and
36:52
Yandex and all of them when you search for the term Operation
36:57
Desert Shield, Desert Storm, all you get are military and
37:02
government websites. So and they're all basically
37:05
glowing about and this is how they're controlling information
37:12
online is the way they prioritise the information.
37:17
So if you can get hold of hard copy books, keep them for your
37:21
next generation because this history matters.
37:35
Obviously the sanctions continued the destruction of
37:40
Iraq. The brutal genocide or sanctions
37:43
lasted for not ten but 12 years and it basically reduced the
37:50
Iraqi population. I think that by at least half a
37:56
million, if not a million, especially children.
37:59
And a very good video or documentary to watch is John
38:04
Pilger's on his website johnpilger.com.
38:07
Bless his heart. Paying the price, killing the
38:10
children of Iraq. And then the cherry on the cake
38:18
of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq a second time.
38:25
And it was with a little bit of this background knowledge that
38:30
galvanized me to leak the memo as well, because I had a vague
38:34
idea of what had gone on before. And these are the sorts of
38:40
people I know. This is a manipulated image, but
38:43
this person, or can I call it a person?
38:47
It can I call it a person? They're emblematic of the
38:55
puppets that are being manipulated in order to do the
39:00
will of the deep state. So the occupation of Iraq
39:06
continued after the invasion, and the US introduced A
39:10
parliamentary system in Iraq, which was very sectarian.
39:16
They divided the parties into sectarian groups.
39:20
And this is what the British Empire was famous for doing
39:24
across the world when it was at the peak of its empire.
39:28
They absolutely created a deluge of U.S. dollars in they, you
39:33
know, people were taking suitcases full of U.S. dollars
39:37
and handing it out to whoever they wanted, which exacerbated
39:42
corruption. And the Iraq oil revenue is
39:45
controlled to this day by the New York Federal Bank, so Iraqis
39:53
cannot access their own oil revenue to this day.
39:59
Iraqis also don't have hardly any functioning economy.
40:06
This YouTube video was very informative.
40:10
It's on a a YouTube channel called Neutrality Studies and
40:15
the title is Iraq, the Unending Agony of a Modern Day Colony.
40:21
Now we have to be clear about this.
40:25
Iraq isn't a functioning country.
40:27
It's a colony of the US and what they do is they hand out, in
40:33
fact, the US flies millions of dollars to Iraq, cash, paper
40:39
money to Iraq for them to pay something like 5 million of
40:45
their population just to basically do nothing, to not be
40:51
productive. So these are so-called civil
40:54
servants, but they really sit around doing nothing.
40:57
They also pay for the, the pensions and the, you know, the
41:03
health and so on and so forth. But Iraq only exports oil.
41:09
It doesn't have any other creative and manufacturing
41:15
productivity. And they have to import
41:18
everything. They have to import everything.
41:22
And this is exactly what happens in happened my husband told me
41:28
in Turkey. So I came to the idea just a few
41:36
hours ago that, you know, the British government actually
41:40
labels all of us according to our race, education, economy,
41:46
our employment ability and so on.
41:48
They have this categorisation system for all of us.
41:52
If you work in the civil sector, you're probably aware of how
41:56
they categorise us. I believe they categorize
41:59
countries as well. And there are some countries
42:01
which they will never allow to develop.
42:07
They have to be subjugated, they have to toe the line, they have
42:12
to be basically subservient to. It's still a colonial worldview,
42:20
a neo liberal imperial worldview.
42:27
So to carry on, I'll just quickly whip through these.
42:33
I think you can hopefully see them.
42:37
This is the war economy. This is what we've been living
42:43
through for the last 100 years more or less.
42:48
And it's a massive money spinner.
42:51
So, you know, the war on drugs, for instance, it's already been
42:56
declared openly that the war, the 50 year war on drugs has
42:59
failed. We can see it's failed.
43:02
You know, we can see that our countries are awash with Class A
43:07
drugs. The the total cumulative
43:13
spending in the US, just in the US alone for 50 years on their
43:18
so-called war on drugs was $1 trillion.
43:22
By 2020, three. The combined so-called estimate
43:29
for the War on Terror in the US was $8 trillion.
43:34
We know from our own recent lived experience the war on
43:39
viruses or war on COVID. It costs the UK taxpayer £1
43:44
trillion. At least it costs the American
43:48
taxpayer $14 trillion. So all they're doing is making
43:55
money for themselves, for their cronies, for the billionaires.
44:02
And now I believe there are even some trillionaires and we are
44:08
becoming further and further impoverished.
44:12
And so I have to ask everyone, what is this place good for?
44:20
If I had a a good technical knowledge, I would have it
44:23
swirling down the toilet bowl. So to conclude, I my last two
44:33
slides, I hope it this wasn't death by PowerPoint.
44:37
The Anglo American neo imperial rules based international order
44:41
was always a sham. The rule is we make the rules,
44:47
you comply. I don't like complying as you've
44:50
noticed. In fact, when I came into the
44:53
airport this time and they tried to direct me down to the
44:57
scanning machines, I said no, I want to go to the human border
45:01
control guards and they kept saying no, but you've got to go
45:04
down there. I said no, I don't, I'm going to
45:06
go there. And they sent the border guard
45:09
police to try and persuade me to go down to the machines.
45:12
And I said, look, I am not going through the machines.
45:16
I don't consent. I'm going to the human till.
45:21
And I said, by the way, if everybody went down there, there
45:24
would be no jobs for the humans. And he sort of smirked.
45:27
So he let me through anyway. A former FBI senior episode.
45:37
A former FBI senior official, Ray McGovern.
45:41
He expanded the term military industrial complex to make it
45:47
the Mickey Mutt. Mickey Mutt, obviously also
45:52
alluding to Mickey Mouse. So the Mickey Mat is the
45:57
military industrial congressional intelligence media
46:01
academic think tank complex. And it is not if it is still not
46:10
pulling the strings at any rate, it is enforcing the status quo.
46:15
These factors, these factions are enforcing the status quo.
46:22
So we can see from the history of Iraq what's going on in Gaza,
46:27
in Syria, in Yemen, in Lebanon. Their values have been
46:33
obliterated. They have absolutely no right to
46:38
even talk about values. So the regimes in the UK and the
46:46
US and in North America, they are clamping down because they
46:51
are fearful that they have been found out.
46:56
And it's because of brave independent journalists and news
47:01
organisations like UK Column and Whistleblowers and activists and
47:05
lawyers and wide awake men and women like everyone gathered
47:10
here. It's because of all of us that
47:13
they are absolutely determined to clamp down because they have
47:18
no other answer and the only way we can break their control is if
47:26
we keep saying no, bugger off. And we break their spell by
47:34
telling people in a humble way. Not in a I'll tell you what I
47:41
know away, but in a way to just draw out other people's worries
47:47
and concerns and then gently feed it into them.
47:52
Together we can build a stronger community, which we're doing
47:55
here today. And together we can resist their
47:58
techno fascist feudalism. Thank you very much.